It's easy enough to tell what is wrong: broadly, the imperative to update legacy systems and become more easy to do business with, internally and externally, leveraging technology. And the answers are out there, in great abundance, even, as is the will to improve.

It even sounds dauntingly technical: "automated underwriting." The phrase conjures visions of people who use the word "maths," engineers and actuarials, tinkering in some ivory tower. But among the first points made by each of those interviewed for our feature story is that automated underwriting, while clearly enabled by and dependent on the emergence of several technologies, is really about solving problems in workflow. The benefits being happier users and increased profitability.